Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

9.8. PUBLISHING AND DISCOVERY

The second phase of the governance technology enforcement tier is focused on the publishing and discovery of services. Due to the nature of creating SOA-based systems, services will likely be developed by numerous entities. In most cases the development teams are distributed and concurrently building services for the enterprise. It is vital that each of these development groups provide common publications of their services so that they can be used by other groups within the enterprise. To facilitate the promotion of services from development through production, we recommend implementing multiple registries for development, staging, and production. See Exhibit 9.6.

By having multiple instances of the registry, the enterprise can enforce different levels of compliance at differing stages of service creation. Often, the development registry is simply used as a "sand box" where developers can place services and their artifacts in the catalog to claim names and to provide rudimentary information about the projected service.

When publishing services to a service registry for discovery, there are clear governance processes and policies to be enforced.^[] For example, the publishing process may require numerous steps to be completed satisfactorily first before the service is made available for consumption:

^[] Eric Marks and Michael Bell, Service-Oriented Architecture: A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology, John Wiley & Sons, 2006. ...